Google’s cunning plan to save targeted advertising on the web once it kills off third-party tracking cookies in Chrome browser is in trouble after a key web standards body rejected the idea.
The online ad industry is racing toward a 2024 deadline when Google intends to phase out third-party cookies from Chrome, the world’s most popular web browser. Since 2020, Google has been testing several cookieless proposals as part of its Privacy Sandbox initiative, which are designed to allow targeted advertising to continue to work on the web but in ways that better preserve user privacy.
Once such proposal is Topics API, which allows advertisers to target ads to website visitors based on broad topics like “fitness” or “books,” based on their browsing history on a given site over a three-week period. Inferred by the browser, these topics wouldn’t identify the user to the advertiser or their adtech vendors. Instead, those topics would surface up to five areas of interest for that user over that period of time.
But the World Wide Web Consortium, known as the W3C, asked Google not to go ahead with Topics API in its current form.
W3C’s Technical Architecture Group Amy Guy, told Github post the body says Google’s plan breaks spying rules and props up what is there already.
Guy said that Topics didn’t give users enough control around the topics being shared from their browser and that third-parties could stitch together data from topics with other data about a user in order to build profiles on them.
Guy is worried that topics could be used to customise content in a discriminatory manner. That could include the potential to select which ads to show groups of users by inferring sensitive or protected characteristics, such as a person’s race.
Guy noted in her Github post that the Topics proposal hadn’t received support from Mozilla and Webkit, responsible for the Firefox and Safari browsers.
Robin Berjon, standards and governance lead at research firm Protocol Labs and a W3C board member, said the latest development from TAG suggests Topics API has little chance of a credible future.
“No other browser vendor wants it, and the leading authority on web architecture has rejected it,” said Berjon.
